Further Joy

by John Brandon

  Tommy yawned and Gil took a step away from the pipe and coughed, and then Teaford was speaking again. He told them the piano was in fine shape, though out of tune after its bumpy late-night ride, and that it was being housed in a red barn that was nearby an institution of learning.

  The Sheriff tipped his head upward, a gesture of consideration. Off the top of his head, he could think of two such barns. Three, really. He looked back toward Teaford’s house, the direction they’d walked from. The watermelon patch, even from this distance, was a sorry sight, a charred tangle. But the oak tree on the other side was immense and lording and seemed somehow disappointed with everything in its view.

  III

  THE CUSTOMS

  Joyce had taken up smoking again. As a girl she’d smoked imported cigarettes that came in lavish tins, but now she smoked light American brands like everyone else. She was able to go to a street fair themed on berries and pick out a red ashtray shaped like an octagon, on which was printed the message: OH, GO AHEAD. She got to buy a lighter too. The lighter had a dolphin on it, and a sun of faded orange.

  Outside a liquor store a kid stopped Joyce and handed her twenty dollars, wanting Joyce to bring him out some beer. The kid had two bony, bad-haired girls waiting in his car. They were in bikini tops. They were watching the kid open-mindedly, giving him every chance. Across the street was a driving range. People in thin sweaters kept smacking balls and losing sight of them.

  Joyce asked the kid why he’d chosen her and he said he’d been waiting ten minutes and no one young had gone into the store. Not that she was old. He said there was one guy who was fairly young but he didn’t look right.

  “Why not?” Joyce asked.

  “Just the attitude, I guess,” the kid said. “He seemed… really sure about the day he was having.”

  Joyce shouldn’t have known what he meant, but she did. She nodded toward the girls in the car. “Where are you going to take them?” she asked.

  The kid was wearing a dress shirt, sleeves buttoned at the wrists. He took a moment deciding what to do with Joyce’s question, realizing he had to answer whatever she asked if he wanted his beer.

  “Way out in the woods,” he admitted. “This place my dad took me fishing once.”

  “I hope it’s still the way you remember it.”

  “Nobody would’ve built on it or anything,” the kid said. “It’ll be the same. It’s just a scummy little pond.”

  “Well, maybe you’ll make some new memories on it.”

  “Thanks,” the kid said. He might’ve been blushing.

  “My father never took me fishing. He only took me to rodeos.”

  The kid glanced inside the liquor store. “My dad is dead. He’s been dead for years. I guess your dad’s probably dead too.”

  “What did your dad die of?” Joyce asked.

  “Liver troubles. Among other things.”

  “You should tell the girls he died last week. Or do they know you?”

  “No, they don’t know me. They don’t know a damn thing about me. I live in Colorado now. I’m just back for the week.”

  Joyce smiled at the girls in the car. She had the kid’s crisp bill folded and pinched between her thumb and forefinger. The multitude of low pings from across the street was mustering into some kind of crescendo.

  The name of the lot was Coos Auto Brokers and the motto was Good Cars, Good People. The cab dropped her off under a huge concrete overhang, and she pushed inside through the glass doors. On the counter in the lobby sat a toaster-size television playing a British movie. After a minute, Joyce’s salesman, Garrett, took her outside. Joyce had shared a car with her daughter for years, neither of them needing to drive very often. She’d gotten rid of that car, a modest Japanese errand-runner, but hadn’t bought another one. She hadn’t felt up to visiting a car lot until today.

  Garrett looked like a Navy kid home for a holiday—crew cut, cloth tie. He pressed a button on the keychain then guided open the driver door of a Saab station wagon. The cars passing on the road were very close, mostly pickups.

  Joyce said she wanted the car. She said she wasn’t in the mood to do a test drive. Garrett looked into Joyce’s eyes. He told her that test-driving the car wouldn’t prove anything, anyway. He gave her his word that it ran as smooth as whatever simile she liked, that it handled as tight as whatever simile she liked, that the extra space in the back was as handy as any simile she liked. On the downside, the stereo was tricky. Also, the nearest Saab mechanic was up the coast in Florence.

  In Garrett’s wood-paneled closet of an office, Joyce filled out the paperwork. Garrett lit a cigarette and put his feet up on his flimsy desk. He had hung tiny stuffed fish on the walls, fish that looked like bait.

  Garrett put his cigarette out; the room was too small. “Do you want to go see those carnivorous flowers with me? I’ll tell them about this sale and they’ll give me the afternoon off.”

  Joyce dialed her daughter’s number and the recorder picked up. She listened to her daughter’s voice, then she called back and listened to it again.

  Her daughter had had about a hundred friends. She’d been on the verge of adopting a Korean child, an ordeal she’d reached the final stages of after three years of hustle. She’d been a steady, strong person, not feisty and impulsive like Joyce. Joyce had gotten pregnant young and had raised her daughter with everything she had, persistently, at times by example.

  What Joyce remembered of her daughter’s funeral was the wind. It had been born over some desert, worlds away, and had gotten lost—a sharp-gusting and dry wind that had left Joyce’s coat crisp and wrinkled, her skin nipped. The sun had been out. People squinted and held down their dresses. Joyce hadn’t known half the mourners. They’d been a crush of intelligent, light-colored eyes. They’d dressed so well, had removed their jewelry and done what they could to conceal their tattoos. It felt like they’d come from another country but knew the customs of Joyce’s land better than she.

  The utilities in Joyce’s daughter’s home had been shut down for months, but Joyce still paid the phone bill.

  Joyce opened the blinds and saw a barge plowing tranquilly out to sea. A bunch of gulls tussled over something and then decided they didn’t want it. Out in the surf, a dog chased a tall bird. Whenever the dog got close, the bird, with gawky effort, would beat itself into the air and glide farther down the beach, where it would resettle, regain its dignity, and put the chase out of its mind. And here came the dog again.

  Joyce neatened her house, dusted, wiped down the mirrors without looking at herself, lined up the tumblers and flutes and shot glasses and highball glasses and martini glasses just so. She folded laundry, dumped the rest of the coffee down the sink.

  She put on a long sweater with big, square pockets and stepped out onto the back porch with her cigarettes. There was enough breeze to carry the barking of a single sea lion. Joyce heard them all the time now, always sounding like they were protesting a loss, like they were calling helplessly toward the sky, refusing to be reasonable.

  ESTUARY

  You may remember that summer, the way it ground to a halt. The sun would get straight overhead where you could barely find it, and just stay lost up there. I kept leaving sunglasses all over town so I started buying the cheapest pairs I could find, six dollars and oversize and with lenses that turned the world gray. The baseball team down in Tampa was still in last place. There’d been repeated threats of shipping them to a bigger market where they could get a fresh start, but finally everyone understood it was a bluff. Tampa was stuck with them, as they were stuck with Tampa. Freaks roamed the beach, my favorite an old man who ate entire watermelons on demand. Children would approach him, lugging the outsize fruits in their frail arms, and the old man would whip out a machete and get to work and every trace of the pink flesh would disappear down his gullet in under a minute. And of course there were all the minor shark attacks, which were even more frequent that year. Everyone kept saying something was in the water, that
some pollutant was turning the sharks even more ornery. The town I was living in was built on a shallow cove with two or three thin rivers pouring into it, and the sharks out there were mostly youngsters. The waters were a training ground—the school fish drowsy, the currents mild, the swimmers pale and off-guard and accustomed to chilly lakes.

  It wasn’t like I had nothing to do. I’d agreed to fix a restaurant space up for an old high school classmate and her girlfriend. The place was small but it was on the corner of a block right down by the beach and had windows you could sell out of hand-to-hand. It wasn’t going to be a sit-down restaurant. Cammie, the brains of the operation, and the money, didn’t want to deal with a wait staff. She was going to serve cold soups and pressed Cubans, one appetizer of salsa and plantain chips, key lime pie and coffee. I’d known Cammie since the old days. She’d used her real name then, Rachel. She looked exactly the same now, but with simpler hair. And she still had those same legs. She wore unmemorable white shorts and unmemorable white sneakers, but you remembered her legs. I’d never met her girlfriend, but I imagined she was on the brawny side because she worked security on a rundown casino boat.

  Cammie’s job, on the other hand, was orchestrating the dessert room at a pricy steakhouse down in Tampa. She was paying me $350 a week right out of her salary, and the deal was that when the restaurant opened I’d be in for a percentage and get a job with them—assistant manager in charge of sweeping or something. Chopping up the salsa. Didn’t matter to me. When I pictured Cammie and her girlfriend I pictured them peaceful and whispering at the end of a day. Maybe they’d have a lamp on, and they’d each be reading a book, their legs tangled up on the couch. One of them would pass the other a cookie from a plate. They didn’t need the restaurant. It was a venture that might make their nice life even nicer.

  I had no deadline for getting the place ready and I always felt like I was working too fast. I wasn’t used to getting paid by the day, wasn’t used to being an employee, and I wondered if I was meant to be stretching the tasks instead of burning them up. After a couple weeks, I had the storeroom stripped and the ceiling repainted and the toilets installed and new screens in and the windows gliding up and down with a finger. Lighting fixtures and ceiling fans. Hot water heater. There were a couple steps just inside the door, and I bolted a handrail onto the wall alongside. I had most of the floor ripped up. I knew I needed to pace myself, so I began a slow morning habit of clearing all the breeze-fallen palm fronds off the front walk. I dragged them to the fence at the rear of the strip mall, where they rested in a brittle rising drift, dry as paper. I had the feeling, doing any of this, of going through motions, a dull, drained feeling, like if anything were going to work out for me it would’ve already happened.

  A couple nights a week, tired from working and from trying not to work, I’d sit in my truck down on the stretch of beach where you could drive cars and I’d wait for people to get stuck. In the dark you could easily veer from the hard-packed strip into the loose sand. One night the dusk brought me this stand-up comedian and this woman twice his age. He was set to perform at a club I’d never heard of, opening for a sitcom actress I’d never heard of. He didn’t come up with any funny remarks about being stuck in the sand and, in fact, acted kind of solemn while I hooked him up behind the 4x4. He and his middle-aged woman were in a rental, a late-model muscle car made to look like its classic predecessor. After I hauled the car loose, the comedian said he was eternally grateful, in those words. He’d never been late to a show in his life. The woman was drunk, or maybe she wasn’t. Beads and feathers were dangling in her hair. She said this was the last summer she was going to be sexy. She was glad it was lasting forever.

  The little city I was living in was a few towns north of Tampa and a few towns south of where I’d grown up. People wound up here because no one else would have them, because there were already too many lawyers in better towns or too many pharmacists in better towns, because they couldn’t afford to retire in Naples, because, in rare instances, they were born here. In my case, a bunch of projects had fallen through at the same time. Normally my projects collapsed in a staggered fashion, which always left me with one or two irons in the fire, one or two reasons to be optimistic. Marketing was my area of schooling and I was also handy enough to help out on a construction site, but I’d tried to push into the foreclosures boom, had sought a patent for a lawn-care tool, founded a maid service, bought a slice of an on-demand storage company that went belly up. I’d taken a couple stabs at the forty-hour-a-week cubicle thing too—once I got laid off and once I hated it so much I wound up walking out in the middle of the morning.

  My girlfriend finally had enough, and that’s what left me fleeing south for shelter. We’d been together nine years, so “girlfriend” doesn’t seem weighty enough a term. We’d always been happy, at least fairly so, until the last year or two. We were the couple who wouldn’t split up—everyone else believed that and for a while we did too. It got to where I was rooting for her to leave me, wishing for it every afternoon once the profitless, drummed-up tasks of my day ran out. I had no idea if I was still in love with her or not. Once enough time passes, there’s no way to tell. What I did know was that we’d stopped taking meals together, we’d stopped asking how the other’s day went, and when we slept together it was like we were actors, like we were trying to convince each other how much passion was still between us. I honestly wanted better for her than what she was getting from me. I honestly wished her well.

  So now I was living with Mike and Melanie. Freeloading, one might say. My girlfriend was up in Atlanta and my parents had retired to North Carolina. I had breathing room, at least. Before I left, I’d sold everything that was mine, that I couldn’t imagine my girlfriend having use for, and left the proceeds pinned under the toaster for her on the kitchen counter. I only kept my big pretty 4x4. It was my lone significant possession. $350 a week, the fixing-up-the-restaurant money, wasn’t enough that I wanted to try getting my own place. It was enough for tallboys and gas for the truck and it felt righteous, pathetic as it sounds, to sock some honest cash in a manila envelope for savings. My girlfriend and I had had some investment accounts together, and I’d taken my name off them. I hadn’t wanted to mess with divvying any of that, and I have to say it was a free, clean feeling—not having a money market that inched sideways each month, not moving puny sums from here to there and trying to figure out if it made a difference, perking up or pouting with the rise or fall of the stock market.

  Mike and Melanie were lawyers. They had too many rooms in their house so one was Mike’s painting studio and one an exercise room. They were friends of ours, of my girlfriend and me, but somehow it didn’t feel awkward that they’d taken me in. It didn’t feel like they were taking sides or anything. I think my girlfriend, my ex-girlfriend, was happy to be able to talk to Melanie and keep tabs on me. And Mike had always enjoyed my company. I felt like I was using up some kind of capital living with them, all the credit I’d accrued by conducting myself decently. I thought I deserved a soft place to crash because I’d always been fair and forthright. I’d never cheated anyone. I didn’t lie.

  I didn’t know how long I could stay with them—how long I wanted to, or was allowed to. Melanie went for protracted runs around the neighborhood and Mike came home late, usually holding up dinner, amazed and amused at how hard his firm worked him. Most days, they’d leave a bunch of ingredients out on the kitchen counter and I was supposed to cook. This was Melanie’s idea. She was smart. She’d buy all these ingredients I couldn’t afford, but by cooking I got to feel like I’d contributed. Lamb. Veal chops with rosemary. Steak tartare and mussels. Thai green curry fish.

  One day, I was getting some braised pork belly and sweet potato fries underway and Melanie came home and presented me with a pair of sunglasses. They glinted in the dim kitchen lights. They had a case and then the case had a snug baggie it fit inside. I couldn’t have made a guess at how much the sunglasses cost. I thanked her and set them
up behind the sink, next to a potted bamboo plant.

  Melanie hoisted herself onto the middle island to face me and watched as I rubbed fennel seed and allspice onto the meat.

  “I decided I’m going to tell you if Dana starts dating anyone,” she said. “And if you start dating someone, I’m going to tell her. I’m not getting into keeping secrets. It’s something I decided about how to handle this situation, so I’m letting you know.”

  “What if I don’t want to hear about her dating someone?” I said.

  She picked up half a cabbage and held it in her hands, looking at me like I was playing a tiresome game. I perused the knife block and chose one and slid it out. They had a knife for every different food you could possibly want to cut.

  “So?”

  “So?” she said.

  “Is she dating anyone?”

  “No, not yet. I’m saying if. I’m just laying out my policy.”

  I pulled out a deep fryer and poured oil in it, then pushed a newspaper that was lying there to a safe distance, over near a decorative jug of chili peppers.

  “Remember when we all went to Paso Robles?” Melanie said. “This is something I was thinking about.”

  I waited.

  “The last place we went, we could barely walk. You ran over a rosebush with the rental car. You guys were taking big handfuls of the chocolates. The lady who worked there was getting all worked up, giving us tiny pours, and Mike asked her what kind of champagne she’d recommend for a toddler’s funeral.”

  “I think I remember that.”

  “She kicked us out. She had the phone in her hand, like she might have to call the police.”

  “I remember that day,” I said. “Most of it.”

  “You fell on the ground laughing,” Melanie said. “I just stood there. I didn’t see how it was funny. The look on the lady’s face—she was afraid. She was shaking.”